Dell boosts DAS performance with 6Gbps SAS

Posted on January 13, 2010

-- Dell rolled out a new line of 6Gbps SAS storage controllers and enclosures today that tout twice the performance of its previous family of SAS-based DAS products.

The new Dell 6Gbps SAS portfolio includes a pair of PowerVault storage enclosures and three new models of the company's PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC).

The PowerVault MD1200 is a 2U array with 12 drives that supports both 2.5" and 3.5" hard disk drives (HDDs), including 10,000rpm and 15,000rpm drives, as well as SAS-based solid-state disk (SSD) drives. The MD1200 is expandable to support eight enclosures with a total of 96 drives.

The PowerVault MD1220 offers a bit more in the way of overall performance when compared to the MD1200. The system supports 24 2.5" small form factor (SFF) drives and is expandable to a maximum of 192 drives.

Dell is targeting the MD1220 at I/O-intensive applications with random IOPS, including large databases, Web serving applications and e-mail.

Pricing for the PowerVault MD1200 and MD1220 starts at $5,145 and $5,637, respectively.

The PERC H200 and H700 are internal storage controllers and the PERC H800 is Dell's high performance external controller.

Dell is banking on 6Gbps SAS as the storage architecture of choice for a range of future products.

"6Gbps SAS is important because it's the foundation for next-generation storage. SCSI was fine for inside of servers and for DAS, but SAS enables a lot more functionality and is a much better back-end storage architecture with dual-port drives and better scalability," Shoobe says.

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